


dead, nothing going on in my head

by sporeshroom



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Vomiting, dirt where it shouldn’t be (organs), dispassionate puns, jude: man this normal human guy i found who is helping me dig up a corpse is really weird, many eyes where they shouldnt be, maybe i wont burn him to death?, michael: has just had his who violently unseparated from his what, mike: is dead and buried, nah that doesnt even sound right, temporary described character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:55:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27990369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sporeshroom/pseuds/sporeshroom
Summary: Jude digs up an acquaintance's grave with the help of a person she met on the train. She still hasn't decided how many people will be leaving this alive.
Relationships: Jude Perry & Michael Shelley, Michael "Mike" Crew & Jude Perry, Michael "Mike" Crew & Jude Perry & Michael Shelley, Michael "Mike" Crew & Michael Shelley
Comments: 39
Kudos: 90





	1. grave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its michael jude and mike so. general warning for; lying/manipulation, burns, dirt, desc of injury, bullet wounds and vomiting. I don't think that any of it is super bad, but it is there and it may get worse
> 
> title is from total meltdown by dz deathrays

“I’m surprised you were willing to drive all the way out into the middle of nowhere with a total stranger. That wasn’t very smart of you, you know,” she tells him. She doesn’t look very surprised.

Michael Shelley hefts one shovel towards Jude Perry. He is leaning on the second like a cane, where it is already planted in the centre of the loose patch of dirt. His arm is shaking, slightly. _Just from the effort_ , Jude thinks, _of holding a_ spade. Jude also thinks that this is funny.

“I’d hardly call you a total _stranger_ ,” Michael says, through hair that seems to choke him. “We just spent two hours in the same car. I’m going to drop this if you don’t take it.”

Jude takes it.

Michael leverages the other shovel further into the earth with both hands, and removes the first clump of dirt. Though it is clearly more disturbed than the rest of the flat-packed ground, it does not easily come free. _Clingy_ , Michael thinks.

They dig in near silence. Michael’s breath comes heavy, and inexplicably sharp. Jude doesn’t breathe.

Michael stops to lean on his shovel and cough. They’ve been piling the dirt a ways away from the dig site; no need to heighten the walls of the hole, but it is more effort. Jude stops as well, and watches him, maybe not wanting to do more of the digging than she has to. Michael wonders if it would have mattered to her if he hadn’t been there too. Maybe she would have found someone else to share the work.

“Still think you’re crazy for coming out here with me.”

Michael pushes his blonde hair up with one hand, over his head, out of where it had fallen into his face. “It feels like you don’t even want me here,” he pouts.

Jude grins. No lines appear in her face when she does so, as if her skin has forgotten how it should stretch. “What do you think you’re getting out of this anyway? It’s,” She checks her watch “Two in the morning. I could easily get away with it if I was just leading you out here to kill you.”

Michael shrugs. It’s a rolling movement, in three parts, and looks far more contrived than a shrug should. “Didn’t have any other plans. And what? Shovel murder? I don’t feel like you were planning on making me dig my own grave and bashing my skull in. Doesn’t seem your style.”

“Oh yeah?” Jude leans on her shovel. The wood crackles, just slightly. “And what does seem my style?”

“Immolation. And I don’t think that you’d help with the digging; if you were to kill me some other way. Lot of effort to drive me so far our and help me dig. Less effort to set me alight and torch the evidence.”

“Oh well now you’re just giving me ideas,” Jude smirks. _Going for threatening_ , Michael thinks. It doesn’t land. ( _He’s not an_ airport, he thinks, _not anymore. Why should anything land?_ )

“Then you’d have to dig the rest of this yourself,” He says, and plunges his shovel back into the lurking dirt.

Jude snorts. “You’re a weird guy,” and she leaves it at that.

With a sickening crack, Michael drives the shovel down, and lifts it back up dirt-free. Jude pauses— looks— and sees nothing in the pit that he could have struck. She watches still, as his next s scoop unearths the soil right next to his right foot. He hasn’t flinched, and his shoe seems undamaged but Jude knows what she heard.

“Did you just hit your foot?” She doesn’t ask if he’s okay, because that’s not what this is about. She just wants to know whether to laugh.

Michael stops to raise an eyebrow at her. “I think I would have noticed if I had.”

Jude does not raise an eyebrow, because she cannot raise one at a time, and feels it would be giving him some sort of satisfaction or one-up. She does make eye contact. “So you didn’t hear that then? The _cracking_ noise.”

Michael frowns. “I didn’t. Probably some sticks trapped in the dirt or something.” He doesn’t break eye contact with her.

Jude doesn’t blink. She waits. Michael blinks, offbeat, one eye closing and opening just slightly before the other. Jude frowns.

“Did you just blink at me like a fucking lizard?”

Michael resumes digging. “I thought lizards didn’t blink, they’ve got really long tongues and lick their eyeballs or something. Be sick as hell if I could do that though.”

“Lizards definitely blink. And that’s not _answering my question_.” Her tone is light. The crackling sound of burning wood is also light.

“Sure it is. Hey check it out, I’ve hit something,” Michael tells her. _Deflecting_ , Jude thinks, _so he can continue to be a little bitch about her question_. She loosens her grip on the shovel. It wouldn’t do to break it before they’ve finished. Be so inconvenient.

Still, she comes around to stand next to him, as Michael crouches down and brushes dirt away with his hands. Pale fingertips emerge, and Jude waits for the moment of realisation, of horror. Of _fear_. The tall, hunched, stranger continues to scrape away the dirt, until the first two segments of four of the fingers on Mike Crew’s left hand are visible. Michael hooks his pointer finger under them, and holds the tops down with his thumb, as if checking the nails for dirt (they’re full of it), and tilts his head up at Jude.

“Is this what we’re expecting?” He asks, as if double checking that the waiter delivered their food correctly. Not as if realising that he’s been driven two hours into the woods to help Jude dig up a corpse. ( _A body more likely_ , she muses. _Corpse is such a strong word for an avatar_.) Mike’s middle finger twitches, like he’s trying to flip her off from the grave.

Michael is still staring at her. She’s not sure that he’s blinked. If she was still human like him, she’s not sure that she could have won that staring contest. But that’s something she has on him, she thinks.

She says “Sure,” and Michael stands, picks up his shovel, and begins to dig again, with less abandon than before.

He gestures at her own shovel, where she dropped it on the other side. “We should be more careful then.”

“Should we?” It begins to sprinkle. It wouldn’t stop her fire, but Jude _hates_ the rain.

“I’m sure your friend would appreciate it.” Mike’s whole hand is in the air now.

“He’s not really a friend.”

Michael leans his head hard to the left, and Jude hears four cracks. “No difference to me.” To the right. Three cracks. Mike’s face begins to emerged.

“Is that a _bullet wound_?” Jude sounds incredulous, even to herself. She didn’t know someone hated Mike enough to shoot him. She didn’t know Mike knew enough people to be personally hated that way.

The bullet wound is still red, still glistening even, and untouched by rot or dirt. _Lucky_ , Jude thinks. She’d have expected the Buried to press its way right on in there, cosy up to his brain, and not ever leave. _Very lucky_.

Michael looms over the whole, his metres of hair curtaining both his face and Mike’s. It drags in the turning-to-mud dirt. Jude is glad her own is close-cropped and black. Michael tilts his neck up, face emerging from the blonde. “Yes,” is all he says, rather unnecessarily.

“Do you need a hair tie?” She asks, instead of something angry, disgusted or surprised. The first two she’d be fine with, but surprise doesn’t look good on her, and she didn’t need something stupid slipping out of her mouth.

Michael looks faintly surprised. “I wasn’t expecting you to have one.”

“I might.” The things managed to find their way into her house and pockets somehow. From hookups probably. Jude rummages in her jean pocket and comes up with a ratty purple hair tie. The white elastic inside is emerging from the fraying fabric. _Looks kind of like fried calamari_ , she thinks. She’s more than happy to flick it Michael’s way.

He gathers all his hair, starts to pull it through for a ponytail, and grimaces.

She grins “Something wrong?”

“Regretting trying to put it up like this. Should’ve just braided it. Really is far too much hair to conveniently loop through a band.” Michael’s tone is flat, and vaguely despairing. He sighs. “Too late now though,” and he finishes what is still a fairly successful ponytail, despite his complaints.

“Seems fine,” she turns back to digging. “How much hair you got anyways?” Even tied it falls to his waist, like some Saturday morning cartoon fairy or princess.

He turns back to digging as well. “Enough,” he answers. “But I’ll be lucky if this hairband doesn’t snap, and I’m not really lucky.”

Eventually there is only the dirt encrusting Mike’s neck and head. Michael kneels down to claw at it, scooping it away in large handfuls. It seems to be the firmest part of the earth they’ve dug, and should not come away as easily as it does. Not with how the Buried seems determined to steal this from the Vast, Jude thinks. But come away it does.

Michael asks, at some point, if she’s going to help with this. She delights in telling him no, but delights slightly less when he doesn’t even acknowledge her answer. He just continues to _scrape_.

When Michael’s satisfied that the dirt has lost its grip on the body, he lifts Mike’s head up. What sounds like every single one of Mike’s vertebrae crack when he does this, and Michael frowns.

“Bullet’s still in there. You got tweezers?” He asks her.

Jude levels a flat stare at him. “Wasn’t expecting to need them, so _no_ , I don’t have tweezers.”

Michael’s frown deepens. Mike’s head is in his lap. “I might,” he echoes her from earlier, and starts to rummage through the inside pockets of the puffy blue jacket he’d discarded to the side when they began to dig. Jude might ‘run hot’, and it may whether it’s cold, but she’s still quite certain that it’s out of season for snow jackets. Especially, now that she looks closer, out of season for too small, ripped snow jackets.

Michael doesn’t seem bothered by this, instead looks triumphant when he fishes a pair of tweezers from some hidden pocket.

“Why did you even have those?”

He shrugs. “No idea. Nice to be prepared though,” and with hands that have stopped shaking for the first time all night (she hadn’t noticed before, but now the stillness is unfamiliar), and no further ado, Michael lowers the tweezers into the hole in Mike’s temple, and swiftly pulls the bullet from within.

Dark red and grey sludge trickles out. Michael wonders what impact that’ll have on the guy’s brain function. Jude wonders at the treasures you find on public transport. Maybe she won’t set him alight just yet.

She hadn’t even been planning to get help, had just been looking for some family-man commuter with six figures and a happy family. Michael had sat down next to her (lucky she hadn’t burned him just for that), seen the shitty printed-off map she’d asked (threatened) the Archivist for, and said “Oh, I hate maps. What’s that one for?” And like that, he’d gotten himself invited on her late night archaeology expedition. Maybe she should have thought more about it at the time. She’d just assumed he was high and left it there.

But she has no time to consider this at length, because as soon as the bullet comes free Mike Crew rolls off of Michael, onto his hands and knees, and starts to retch up dirt; black, brown, red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> michael "some guy" shelley is so funny to me. dude's not even trying to act human he's just there. all distortions know how to do is eat hot chip and lie
> 
> [art for this](https://falseknight.tumblr.com/post/637109560535056384/mike-crew-voice-what-if-you-got-dug-out-of-your)  
> 


	2. under heavy sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Michael Crew wakes up, it’s to a full-body ache and a bruised pounding in his skull.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have updated the tags, which is important to note. also kicked the rating up one to be safe
> 
> anyways eurgh. enjoy lol

_Mike Crew is eight years old and standing in a field. It is just him, his best friend Dominica Swain, the man on the hill, and the drizzling rain. The water doesn’t come down heavy, but the sky is loud, and bright, and it scares him. Dominic wants to stay out longer. The clouds swell and distend down towards them; the field stretches forever horizontally, capped by a lowering ceiling. Mike can’t see the highway that he knows should be there. Mike wants to make his friend happy. The clouds come lower. They flash like the sweep of a searchlight. The man on the hill stands motionless while the upper half of his body is swallowed. The clouds come lower. They are the dirty grey of a dust covered car. They are so loud._

_Mike Crew is seventeen years old, and climbing down from his second-storey bedroom window in his parents’s house at 2:39am. This is not the first that he has done this. This is the first time that he has done this while the house collapses behind him. His bag is packed, and waiting on the crawling dirt below. There is a man standing across the street; he is short, and wears a black jacket. The wooden window frame crumbles where he hangs from it, and he barely has time to jump before he would otherwise fall. His parents sleep through it._ The Journal of the Plague Year _rests too, probably exactly where he left in, in the kitchen rubbish bin. He needs to find a better way to clean up the shit he doesn’t want. He thinks that he should care more about his parents’ death, should search through the rubble. He knows that whatever he finds will already be soft with mould, sunken, and half-rotted. The ground sinks under every step, a membrane threatening to break. It hadn’t done so the first time. Mike crosses the street, head down, and shoves the man with his shoulder as he goes. The man wasn’t there the first time, but now he always is. His skin bubbles. It pops. An eye floats to the surface._

_Mike Crew is nineteen years old and sitting cross legged on the bedroom floor of his shitty apartment, slumped against the wall. The ceiling is low, and water-stained, but the lights are a warm yellow. On his lap is a new book; he would know, he keeps good track. This was not one that he had found. This one was nameless— featureless, and bound in grey cloth— and it didn’t have the nameplate he’d come to expect either. That’s fine; Jurgen Leitner couldn’t have possibly found every cursed book in the world, and this book certainly counted as that. It’s written in Cyrillic, and Mike can’t read it. The man seated on his bed would be able to read it. He’s facing away from Mike, which is maybe polite, but it doesn’t matter. Not when he can See Mike just as well with the two eyes framing the vertebrae in his neck as he could the two in his eye sockets. It doesn’t matter anyway, that this man would be able to read the book, when Mike can’t. The book is reading him. Maybe the man is too, and it_ crawls _. The man’s back looks lumpy, in a way that is mostly hidden by his denim jacket, and he isn’t laughing at Mike, but only because he does not ever move. He does not even blink. He and the book are the same that way. It hasn’t blinked either. Mike thinks that if he looked at it any longer he would cease to move too, stuck there crosslegged on the floor until the book had scraped all there was to Know about him from his bones. Fortunately, it takes two to hold a staring contest. The man on his bed remains still when Mike walks over to slide the book back into the shelf on his side of the room. Against his better judgement, Mike stares at the man. The ceiling droops over them. The man’s seven visible eyes stare back. The only indication that he isn’t just a static image is the way his pupils flit, from Mike, to the book, to the bending plasterboard._

_Mike Crew is twenty-three, and he has found his salvation._ Ex Altiora _sits perfectly in one hand, and its words sit perfectly in his mouth, and it doesn’t matter that he’d never learned Latin. He knows what he reads, and as the monster in the book comes closer and closer to the small town he can hear the wind rush louder and louder past his ears. As the infinitesimal people scramble to find a way to slay the infinite beast he does not feel their fear as his own; it is as far from him as the ground is from the beast’s head. At the top of the church tower it is only him and the man sat on the ledge next to him. Mike wonders if he sees how small the world is, even from just three storeys up. It’s dizzying. In a moment it will just be the man, watching the bookseller rush to search for Mike’s body on the street below (he won’t find it). Mike chants, all the air leaving his lungs, and he keeps going without breath, volume rising to a scream. He jumps. He doesn’t hit the street._

_He doesn’t find the sky. The ground opens up and swallows him whole._

When Michael Crew wakes up, it’s to a full-body ache and a bruised pounding in his skull. His head’s laying on something soft. It doesn’t cushion anything when the whole world lurches underneath him (underneath, and not above or all around, and what a _relief_ ), and sends his head jolting against a hard uneven surface. The pounding feeling triples, briefly, and Mike has the feeling that that wasn’t the first time he’d hit his head in that exact spot. He can hear the rush and roar of wind just above, and can feel a breeze overhead.

His eyes are crusted shut, and it’s a gross effort to open them— one after the other— but he manages. Above him is the fabric ceiling of a car. His hands are dry, and feel like they’re covered in a chalk coating. Below him is the backseat. There are two people in the front seat.

Mike remembers; he plunges Jonathan Sims and his friend into the Vast.

For four blissful seconds there is only strangled gasping, and Mike can almost forget that he is still trapped in the backseat of a vehicle moving at high speeds.

Or— not trapped? There is no rope or tape on his wrists. The only thing even marginally binding him is the seatbelt of the middle seat, fastened over him. And then— the car heats about 20 degrees.

“Crew if you don’t _knock it off_ I will turn this car around and put you back in the ground,” Jude grits out.( _The_ ground _? Shit._ ) She has no breath to be sucked out of her, but asphyxiation isn’t the only side effect of endless falling. She’s gripping the steering wheel hard enough that Mike can hear cracking wax.

It’s a humid night, and the air feels _heavy_. _Not heavy as it should_ , Mike thinks. _Just_ stifling _._ The weight of it roils with heat. Mike finally, gently, props himself up onto his elbows to get a good look at the other people in the car; Jude Perry and someone Mike has never met. Something warm and gritty slides down his temple. The smell of burning plastic follows shortly after Jude’s demand; Mike knocks it off.

So— there’s a big gap in his memory, _apparently_ , between getting his skull bashed against his living room wall, and waking up in the backseat of Jude’s car. Probably shouldn’t be surprising, considering the head trauma, and the fact that he wasn’t _covered in dirt_ when he was kidnapped from his apartment.

(“ _Back in the ground,”_ Jude had threatened. Mike isn’t sure if being in the ground in the first place was something he wasn’t ‘all there’ for, or something he had forgotten. Ultimately, he decides that it doesn’t matter; he doesn’t want to know. The dirt clings.)

It’s still a little surprising.

The passenger slams their forearms onto the dash and starts up a gasping, shuddering laugh. It hurts a bit, to listen to. _Really inconvenient that someone with an annoying laugh would also have laughter as a fear response, right in the middle of my headache_ , Mike thinks. _Not considerate at all_ , he adds, playing mental tag with the thought that the sky just feels like the sky. If he’s fast enough, he can dodge the outstretched hands of that _loss-of-weight_ , _loss-of-presence_ that seem so determined to be known.

The passenger straightens, rolls down their window, and turns to face Mike. They are definitely not Jonathan Sims. The Stranger could not make someone that looked less like Jonathon Sims. The passenger is a blonde man, whose head touches the ceiling of the car, even slouched as he is, and whose face and ponytail are streaked with dirt. He opens his mouth as if to speak to Mike, but his gaze flits to Jude in the driver’s seat, and what he says instead is “Is this your car?”

“No,” she snorts.

“Probably for the best. The dirt will never come out,” and then his eyes flick back to Mike for “If you throw up again— or need to spit— try to avoid my jumper.” Then he shuts his eyes, and seems to just…go to sleep. Like it’s easy or something. Weird.

The floor of the car is littered with empty water bottles, Monster cans, one white sock, and a pile of orange fabric that looks to be a high-vis work shirt. Theres a crumpled collection of printed payslips shoved into the pocket on the back of the passenger seat. All of it is coated in a fine layer of dust, which doesn’t reach the front of the car. Mike can see that the floor mats are crusted in mud too.

The only part of the backseat not browned with dust is a folded blue ski jacket, half shoved into the gap between the seat and car door. When light from the sunrise intermittently shows past the trees and into the car, it reflects almost metallically. Hurts a bit to look at when that happens. It’s obvious to Mike that this must be what the stranger was talking about, though he’s not sure why the man had assumed he would be vomiting as soon as he was conscious enough that it wouldn’t kill him.

( _Suffocation’s a funny thing_ , Mike thinks. _To have the air stolen from your lungs as you fall, well that’s suffocation. To have no air at all, as the earth presses in around you, well that’s suffocation also._ )

The car goes over a bump and Mike’s insides _move_. It’s not quite the slosh in your stomach that you might get when, walking around after drinking too much of something. It’s more of a _thwack_ , that slaps against the front of his ribcage as if all his inners, and not just his stomach, are full something much thicker than water or blood. He can’t speak through the grout in his mouth, sealing his teeth shut like bricks in a wall.

In all, there’s a lot more dirt than he’d anticipated. He should have expected it. He can barely feel the breeze from the open window through the dirt and he now understands why the stranger had thought he would need to throw up.

(It’s not that Mike hates dirt, or even the Centre. He hadn’t encountered it in his desperate book-hunting years, but he doubts anything would have called to him the way the Falling Titan did. But even if he doesn’t hate dirt, he hates how it clings so close that he cannot feel anything past it. The Falling Titan had not chosen him, and by nature does not care; couldn’t even know to care about something so insignificant as his failing connection. So if Mike wants to get back to the sky, it is up to him alone. Not that anything he’s done has ever _not_ been up to him alone.

The dirt clings.)

With one hand Mike physically scrapes the mud from his teeth, and with the other he holds onto the door frame. Jude turns the radio up (mostly static with a hint of some local station coming through) while he coughs and spits out the window. He’s there for quite a while, streaking mud and phlegm onto the grey metal door. It was probably silver at some point, he thinks, but age has turned the paint dull. He could tell it was definitely not one of Jude’s cars, even if she hadn’t already told them that it was stolen.

Eventually Mike wipes his mouth with his shirt, feeling a little less heavy. He hasn’t felt this human or this awful in years. It’s…grounding. ( _Ha ha,_ he thinks. _Grounding. Sure._ )

He meets Judes eyes in the rear view mirror, long enough that he weighs death by car crash against death by Jude burning him alive for telling her to focus on the road. Then, she turns the radio back down, and the static diminishes.

“You back?” She says, more than asks

“Yeah, should be,” a thought occurs to him. “Are you expecting something? For digging me up, I mean.”

Jude smirks. “What? You don’t think I did this out of the good of my heart? You think I’m after your body or something?”

Instead of rising to the obvious bait Mike just says; “We’re not exactly close.” He stays unburned another moment.

“Yeah, well you’re not really ‘close’ to anyone,” she tells him. _I’m closer to everything now than I have been since you’ve known me_ , Mike thinks. It’s not something to admit, especially not to Jude Perry.

“Wouldn’t hang around with you if I was.”

“Rude thing to say to my face isn’t it?” The temperature rises, just a little, despite the two open windows. Enough to be uncomfortable, not enough to hurt. _Either Jude’s in a good mood, she actually does consider them somewhat friends o_ r, Mike thinks, _she has some other reason not to kill him_. _Probably not the second. Being friends with Jude probably just puts you further into her firing range. Ha ha. Firing range. On a roll today._

_  
_“…Just respecting the way you operate,” is what Mike goes with. Talking isn’t helping with his headache(s), and the pulsing thickens. Mike raises his left hand to his head where the pounding is strongest. His right hand stays on the door to keep him upright. He’s not sure what he was expected (dirt, mostly), but the patch of still-tacky ruptured skin was not it. “Jude.”

She shoots him an amused glance in the rearview mirror, at his suddenly stern tone. “Yeah?”

“What the hell is wrong with my head?”

Politely, Jude gives him about two seconds to realise his mistake before she bursts into mean laughter. She doesn’t answer him, except to gasp out a “What isn’t?” It’s all very dramatic, and unnecessary. Mike knows she doesn’t have to catch her breath before she answers, she just wants to make a point.

Worse, the passenger joins her. Mike had been convinced that he had fallen asleep, but apparently not. (To be fair, wet retching and ambient wax noises are not generally soothing noises, and were probably detrimental to any efforts to fall asleep.)

Unlike Jude, his laugh is just short this time, and he actually gives an answer. “You were shot.” Albeit, not a great answer.

“Like with a gun?”

“Yeah with a gun,” the guy seems unfazed. “How else?” Mike supposes it makes sense, for a friend of Jude’s to be this way.

Speaking of, Jude’s finishes her laughing enough to cut in with “Or they could have made the hole some other way, and put the bullet in later.”

“Yeah, Jude, I think I get it,” He snaps. His fingertips come back from his forehead a reddish brown. He doesn’t want to know how much dirt got into the wound during his time in the ground. (He wonders if, were someone to look inside, they would be able to see where the Lichtenberg scar hooks below his skin, and sinks deep into his body. He wonders if the Lichtenberg figure still goes deeper than surface level. He hasn’t thought about it in a long time. He doesn’t know if he would miss it, if that was the case.) Then he realises; “Is it still in there?”

“No, we got it out,” the passenger reassures him, and Mike really has to get his name. He cannot keep calling him ‘the passenger’.

“…How?”

“Tweezers,” Jude answers.

“Huh. Glad I wasn’t awake to see you coming for my head with tweezers. Sounds stressful,” Mike thinks he’s taking this all very well.

“Oh, uh, actually it was me,” the passenger interrupts. Mike digs the heels of his palms into his eyes. It doesn’t make his headache any better (it might actually make it worse), but it does mean that he doesn’t have to face the car.

“A stranger. With tweezers, _in my head_. Still glad I was ‘asleep’.”

“Oh! Right sorry,” the stranger says. “I’m Michael. Would offer to shake your hands, but they seem busy.”

“…Mike,” is all Mike can mutter.

“Oh, no, I don’t really do nicknames?” _Michael_ ’s voice has the same anxious tilt to it, but it seems sharper now. _Guy must really care about his boundaries_ , Mike thinks. _Not a bad thing, but somehow surprising_.

All he can verbalise is a groan as he drags his hands down his face and leans back as far as he can, and then, dully; “No, _I’m_ Mike. Mike Crew.”

Jude mutters something that sounds suspiciously like a mocking “ _Bond, James Bond._ ” As if she’s never introduced herself like that. Maybe she hasn’t. Mike wouldn’t know.

“Oh!” Michael laughs. “Kind of you. Saves us having to fight for the name,” he teases. It’s…a bit nice, considering that banter with Jude risks heat death, whereas Michael doesn’t seem the type to care. (He doesn’t really seem in touch with anything enough to care.) Not that Mike can actually know how Michael is, but he’s yet to be threatened so far.

Mike shoots a weak smile, feeling the dried mud crack on his cheeks.

Jude laughs. “I’d almost pay to see that. You’re more than half dead and this one can’t hold a shovel without his arms shaking. Like a little baby horse taking his first steps.”

“Or a giraffe,” Mike adds. It hasn’t escaped his notice _just_ how hunched Michael is in the car. He almost doesn’t want to see him standing.

“Yeah, well, you know.”

“Not sure that I do, actually,” Jude presses.

“Long story really.”

“There’s time.”

Michael laughs, mean. “Privacy means nothing when it’s not _yours_ , huh? I don’t really like questions Jude. I’m sure you understand. It’s actually something I’ve only just figured out. I’ve known it for the last decade, but I always thought that was something else. Maybe it rubbed off on me, and now I hate the same things. Are you getting any of this? This doesn’t mean anything to you. That’s how it’s going to be, but since you _asked_ , what answer do you _want_? Got about four of them on mind.” It’s the most Mike’s heard Michael speak, and it’s the furthest his voice has risen from its mostly flat tone.

_“You’re really hurting my feelings here, you know. I just want to be friends. Friends tease each other don’t they? Friends_ share _.” Mike doesn’t know why she’s pushing this so hard, but he won’t interrupt. Really can’t afford to, in a state like this. Sweat streaks the mud on his legs, where they’re touching the back of the driver’s seat. Jude takes her left hand off the steering wheel, fingers melting, reaches over and—_

The radio crackles.

Jude has both hands on the wheel, and eyes on the road, _for once_. “Ha! Well it looks like you had a little firecracker personality hidden under that hair after all,” she laughs. Incredibly, she seems amused, more than offended.

“Funny. Never something Michael’s been accused of before,” Michael says. There is something weird happening, and Mike doesn’t want to be near it. It feels too familiar.

So he just says “So you’re talking in third person now?”

It goes ignored in favour of Jude’s “You could have said you didn’t want to say.” Mike’s pretty sure that that’s a lie. She would have _pushed further_.

“Not really my thing to be direct.” Michael sounds dismissive.

Mike’s had about enough of this. “Great. So how long have you two known each other? Since I don’t know you Michael, and Jude apparently trusted you enough to let you along on…this.”

Michael says “About two weeks.”

Jude says “Almost a whole day now.”

To himself, Mike says “Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t know which is worse.” To the others he says “Great. Well now that we’ve established Jude’s only here for my body, and there’s no life long friendship bond convincing you to dig up a corpse, you mind telling us what you want out of all this?” Mike tries to keep in mind Michael’s outburst from not even three minutes ago. (Things never tend to stay in his head for long. Not enough space, ironically; first occupied by the fractal lacing itself under and over his skin, then by the falling _space_ — or as much of it as he could cram in there— and now, the pain.) Mike tries not to ask.

“What I want? That’s a pretty big question Mike,” and the way he says ‘big’ is so pointed, and then he smiles at Mike with a side glance to Jude, who isn’t paying attention. Michael’s definitely trying to tell him something, and he really wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t like being direct. Mike does not understand, but he does smile back. “Well,” Michael continues. “I kind of want coffee.”

“…Coffee.”

“Yeah I haven’t been able to drink it for years. I think I missed it,” he laughs. _No unpacking that_ , Mike thinks. _Absolutely not worth the effort_.

“You heard the man,” Jude tells him. “You gonna fork out your sugar baby savings?” He doesn’t answer that. The sun is back behind the same trees it was at the start. It’s starting to worry him a bit.

“Didn’t exactly have my wallet on me when I was dragged out of my apartment unconscious,” he tells her. Still, he digs into his pant pockets and, remarkably, drags out a very dirt-stained £10 note. He stares at it. “Fuck,” he says. “How long has it been? Just realised it’s going to be so much harder to rent another place if I’m legally dead.”

“It’s only June, you should be fine. Doubt anyone’s even reported you missing and you probably just have overdue on your rent. Not like you can’t pay it, rolling in that Fairchild income— if the old man hasn’t already paid it for you!” she tells him, almost reassuring. Really feels like they’re friends for a moment there.

Michael slouches in his seat (impressive, considering how much he has to fold his legs to do it), rests his arm on the windowsill, and starts tapping the car door. Mike ignores how much it sounds like clicking heels on wooden floors. It’s not his business, and he doesn’t want to know. It takes about fifteen minutes of Michael growing more visibly distressed for Mike to snap, as the clicking crescendos.

“What’s your problem?”

Michael sits back up. He tilts his head to one side, then the other, considering. His neck cracks something alarming, about seven times on each side. It’s… _gross_. Eventually he says “You just got me thinking. I’ve been trying to figure out if I can get backpay from my old job for the last uh…eight to eleven years I think? Technically I wasn’t fired, and I _could_ argue I was ‘on a business trip the whole time.’ Wouldn’t even be wrong about it. Even went in to work a couple of times. You got any idea what the legality is on that? Maybe on getting reinstated as alive again too, probably need to do that.”

Jude has fully turned away from the road to listen. _Mike is worried, that she’ll swerve and tear them right off the road. He doesn’t want to die again, buried in the wreckage of a car. He doesn’t think he’ll make it out. He doesn’t worry long. A car merges in front of them, incautious, and close, and Jude is_ not looking _. Hood crumples to one with trunk, and Mikes skull splits on the drivers seat. From his bleeding angle he sees the way Michael’s neck has_ crunched _, between his shoulders and the roof of the car. He should have stayed slouched. Not that it would have necessarily saved him but—_

That heels-clicking noise comes again, though Michael’s hands are still. Jude has both hands on the wheel, and eyes on the road. The look on her face is something like suppressed confusion, which Mike thinks makes sense, considering what she’s just heard. It definitely can’t be the weirdest thing either of them has ever heard, but the supernatural is one thing. A job with that kind of security? Mike can barely even fathom it.

All Jude says is “Definitely worth a shot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> michaels 4 reasons:  
> 1\. used to having longer limbs  
> 2\. hasnt slept in 10 years and is tired  
> 3\. hasnt had limbs in 10 years  
> 4\. only recently alive  
> 
> 
> [new art](https://falseknight.tumblr.com/post/640490592789479424/every-friend-group-has-all-three-evil-banker)


	3. body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael is seeing things.

Michael is seeing things.

When they pull into the car park Michael is almost surprised. He hadn’t been sure they would make it. As the trees thinned and the speed limit kept decreasing, the thickening traffic all around them stayed the exact same distance from Jude’s stolen ride, and from the other cars as well. The vehicles were also all half-translucent, but he was willing to put that down to his sight.

Michael is having trouble seeing things. It used to be easier. Certainly, Michael Shelley had had no troubles like this, with his normal, _human_ eyes. The Distortion had no eyes, and no troubles with that either. And now Michael is stuck somewhere between seeing-as-the-Distortion, and seeing-with-human-eyes. The whole affair is also stuck in the in-between; half ordeal and half automatic bodily function. It’s a headache, is what it is. He can’t stop hitting things, unused to having a body, and not sure where anything he’s seeing is (or if it’s actually there at all). Worst of it was striking for dirt, too confident that he knew where the ground was and he wasn’t. The blade of the shovel cleaved his foot clean through. He could feel the metal parting muscle and vein, the crunch of cartilage, and then it was done; had never happened at all. Jude had caught that. If he was something else, Michael might have been grateful for the proof that he had not imagined the pain. As it is, he’s more concerned that he’s still intact.

It had been a long car ride. There’s an itch in the flesh under his shoulder blades that he can’t scratch with his hands. They don’t reach through the skin anymore, so he rolls his shoulders and tries to focus on something else. _How about those deaths?_ he thinks. He had almost died, did actually die at some points, he knows. But he doesn’t know why it didn’t stick. (He hadn’t kept count of how many times it had happened. Numbers and patterns don’t mean much to him now, except that they continue ad nauseam, and that’s all.) It always happened only briefly, until it had never happened at all, because something else had. Always different, always the same; the way his blood reaches boiling point is almost instantaneous; the way his skin cracks and his fat curdles is slower; the scene distorts, and he is fine.

Is this how Sarah Carpenter felt, he wondered, when she burned up? Michael, newly made, had watched her burn; the skin first, then the webs attached. The flesh charred quickly, but the screams lasted longer. It was impressive, the Distortion had thought, just how long she had managed to scream with all that smoke in her throat, and then with hardly a throat left at all. Not long in actuality; but an age, relative to her condition.

Michael had watched on with familiarity, and had not been able to care. He hadn’t been able to care for anything else either, though he sometimes wanted to pretend. Sarah’s death was not the first supernatural thing he would see, but it would be the second he would remember (excluding himself and his business trip, which really could hardly count; that was just—a homecoming. It’s not a good way to think about it, probably, to give it that weight, and personal significance. But it had been a huge chunk of his life, and it was the only thing that made the webs fall away from him, same as the fire had torn them from Sarah. It gave him back to himself, though at that time there was nothing to give but a name and face, and no one to give it to. He took them regardless, and maybe felt a little bit of gratitude, right there with the hatred of what he now had. What he now was. He got over it. It was used to change, and it could change him too, add some new facets to his existence, some new divots in its appearance, some new carpets or turns in his halls. No longer just the door; now also the hand that opens it, and the face that misleads you in. Michael Shelley would be a terrible Archival Assistant if he couldn’t make people trust his smile enough to follow him somewhere. When he was human, he used to lead the follow up to somewhere public, where he’d be safe if it turned violent. It was a useful skill to keep. Michael wondered if the new assistants were held to Gertrude’s standards. Michael wonders if he’d still meet those standards himself, or if he ever did. Being the aftermath of a social experiment is so hard.)

Michael had always known what had happened to Ryan, even if he hadn’t understood it. He was at the Institute because he wanted to understand, to connect the pieces. He could have, without interference. It didn’t take much when the webs were gone. He had always been sharp.

Emma’s death had come not long after Sara’s, which wasn’t long after Michael’s, and Michael had watched that too. She had been _such an important_ figure in his life, he thought it really only right that he watch. That was what one did in the temple of Eye, right? He wouldn’t know, he’d never done much of itt. She might though, for all that she’d been interested in experimenting, and in _results_. She didn’t see him when she lit up, but he saw her, teeth cracking with the force of staying silent, and lines of web eaten up faster than she could wrap it around herself. She must have thought that she died with dignity, in the end. Or pride, at least—after all she didn’t cry, did she?

More the reason bringing him along was a mistake on Jude Perry’s part. He was very familiar with fire. Gertude’s balancing act had kept her in her humanity so long, at the expense of everyone else turning to ash in her wake. What does he have left to burn, Michael wonders. Must be something, to earn all those deaths. He almost wants to ask Jude if she remembers killing him all those times. Maybe so; she’d gotten hesitant, towards the end of their weeks-long car ride.

It was probably funny. A couple hours to get there—(Equivalent of one and a half plays of the only CD present in the stolen car (Nirvana’s 1991 album, _Nevermind (Deluxe Edition)_. It had a yellow £2.99 sticker, half rubbed off, but still stuck to the bottom right corner.). The music had turned to white noise part way through ,but the track name and number still scrolled across the radio interface and there wasn’t much else for Michael to see. Not with the outside blurred and pulsating as it was)—and a couple of weeks to get back. It would have taken Jude far less time on her own, without whatever muddling thing still follows Michael, just to make his time slip away. It had gotten to the point that he had begun to wonder if they would get back at all; maybe it wasn’t a lingering effect of being something else. Maybe it was like the hallways. Go free for a bit, think you’re safe, until you walk right back in without even realising. Maybe it _was_ the hallways; they didn’t have to be hallways. They could be streets sometimes. Maybe he had died the very first time he’d pushed Jude’s nerves and she’d immolated everything in a 10 metre radius—Fuck, maybe he’d died in 2005, or 2009, or 2011, back on Zemlya Sannikova—and this was his own personal _No Exit_. Maybe he’d survived it all and this was his own personal _No Exit_.

Certainly Jude’s driving was hell on the stomach, which was something that he now had. Probably wasn’t fun for the post-corpse in the backseat either. Mike had spent most of the trip coughing, choking, or clearing his throat. Michael held no doubt his side of the car was splattered and crusting from the window back.

Jude puts the handbrake on, and the car seems to sink noticeably when she takes her foot off the brake. _Be a miracle if it starts up again after that_ , Michael thinks.

“Right,” Jude kicks her door fully open, so that the hinges groan audibly, and slides out. She slams it shut with enough force to move the car. Mike grunts in the backseat.

Michael reaches for the left-most of his door’s three handles. It’s not right one, and it vanishes behind his hand and reappears further away like a mirage. He can see it out the window, laying in the centre of the open park next to them. He tries another handle. He stretches out of the car, and out, and out. It had been too small for him, now that he could not fold in on himself. Not good on the neck.

His vision so kindly stops spinning while he pops all the joints in his shoulders, and some that shouldn’t be there. _An echo_ , he wonders, _or a souvenir from Sannikov Land?_ _Could do worse than a few vestigial joints_. He misses the mobility of before. His hands shake; they feel too light. Everything else feels too heavy. _Which isn’t the right way to describe it_ , he knows, _because there is no right way_.

His vision starts to spin the other way.

Jude’s already at the door, arms crossed, and he’s halfway there, shuffling closer, when he remembers.

“Shouldn’t we get your friend?” He smiles. That’s polite. He used to know how to do polite, so he theoretically still should. _Not that it matters in this company_ , he thinks. _Burning someone to death is not polite. Suffocating someone; also not polite._ Polite is beginning to mean something else in his head, closer to human than to courteous, but that’s fine also. He used to know how to twist something until it was something else, so he theoretically still should.

Jude crosses her arms. “Not my friend,” and it even sounds true. It’s not, but it definitely sounds the part.

“So…”

“I’m not getting him,” she says, with an unspoken ‘ _and that’s final._ ’ But she doesn’t move to go inside either. Michael remembers the heat roiling under her skin. She steps back, almost casually, to lean against the wall. The asphalt sticks to her joggers, threatens to trip her up.

“Okay,” She’d roast her half-dead friend alive. When she had only just gotten him back, too. “I’ll meet you inside then?”

“Sure.” Michael’s glad when she pushes the door open and leaves him outside. Jude’s seen enough of him stumbling around, knowing that he can’t trust what he sees to be there. She seems pretty content to watch him smack into corners, and trip over _nothing_ , and struggle with _weight_ and _pressure_ , and slam _shovels_ into his _foot_ because he can’t _see_ —but that was one particularly bad incident and it hasn’t happened since.

Still, he drags his feet along the ground all the way back to the car, determined not to trip on something that isn’t there until he hits it. Maybe he should get a cane, he thinks. He wonders if they make ones tall enough.

There is only one door handle on Mike’s side of the backseat, but Michael doesn’t reach for it; the door is splattered from the window down in crusted mud and vomit. The whole thing is covered in dust, in a way that the rest of the dirty car just isn’t. Michael rounds the car to the other side.

Mike is conscious but unmoving, and Michael considers just leaving him to rest, but Jude rolled the windows up when she got out, and he’s probably had enough suffocating for a while. Even if not-enough-air is his thing. Funny, the overlap.

Michael also figures that having what looks like a dead body in the backseat of Jude’s car could also prove to be inconvenient if anyone saw.

“Can you move?” He asks.

Mike groans. “Probably. Head feels like shit.”

“Jude’s driving is awful,” Michael agrees, as if that was the problem. “Made me sick and I wasn’t even shot in the head.”

“Right.” Mike still hasn’t moved, except to shove his face into the snow jacket Jude had taken from him to protect her ‘not-friend’s’ head from the car door (not that it worked).

“So…Do you need me to help you out?”

“Where are we?” _Fair question_.

Michael ducks his head out of the car, and glances back at the storefront. He’s not sure if he’ll be able to read the signs, so he chooses not to try. “Shitty Starbucks knock-off,” he reports.

Mike groans again. “Is that—better, or worse than just Starbucks?” He pushes himself upright in the backseat.

“One way to find out,” Michael injects his voice with the abrasive cheer so popular to office jobs. He still has that skill, at least. Mike looks at him in disgust. Cracked mud runs down the lines of his scar like mould between bathroom tiles.

He slides out of the car, taking a few steps before coming back to lean onto the side. Michael’s jacket dangles by the sleeve from his left hand, dragging most of it along the stained tarmac. He’s not particularly attached to the clothes he died in, but he still cares a little about his things. Just enough to be bothered.

“Yeah this…is—is not going to work.” Mike's breathing heavily, though Michael isn’t sure if it’s exertion or just to centre himself.

Michael looks down at him—and it is a long way down to look, now that they’re standing side by side.

“What’s your deal?”

Michael’s smile widens. The sky is yellow or blue or grey. The sky could be anything.“You mean what’s my problem? Haven’t you already asked that?”

Mike snorts. “Was trying for polite, but sure. I’m not getting anywhere fast. What’s your problem? Aside from the backpay.”

“Why do you want to know?” Michael asks, still not sure how he wants to respond. His recent experiences haven’t exactly _endeared_ him to questions or monologues, which he really thought would be less of a problem than it’s turning out.

Mike scrubs at his hairline with the knuckles of both hands. Dried mud flakes down like terrible dandruff. “I didn’t think Jude would dig me up. Wasn’t really thinking at all, mind, but Jude and I aren’t friends.” and joke of all jokes, this time it rings true. “But see I at least know Jude, and I don’t know you at all. Fine, if you and her were friends. But you’re _not_ ,” and he stares up at Michael. A blood vessel’s popped in his right eye turning the inner corner red. “So what is some complete stranger doing, going on a very long car ride with Jude to the middle of nowhere, _surviving_ , and all to dig up my grave?”

_Fair enough_ , Michael thinks. “Fair enough,” he says.

“So?” He’s still making eye contact. Between the gunk caked up around his head wound and the blood in his eye it’s all a little bit gross, and too much of a reminder. Mike is human (or close enough), and he has flesh to rupture and eyes that strain and bleed. And so does Michael now. It’s too tight under his skin, and he rolls his shoulders for the millionth time, hoping—as every time before—that his back will split clean down the spine like a busted seam. When he escapes his skin maybe he’ll finally, _finally_ have enough space for himself. His skin stays solid and smooth. Mike is still staring.

“So nothing,” Michael climbs up to sit on the roof of the car, leaving his legs dangling over the side. If it was actually Jude’s car he might have hesitated, especially feeling the metal move under his weight, but whoever owned this car was so very not getting it back. “I was…something else, for a while, and then that something died, I suppose. And I was left with nothing to do, so I followed Jude out into the woods. I guess I wanted to see what would happen.”

Mike can’t make it up to the roof of the car, atrophied and hungry as he is, which is part of the reason the Michael chose to sit there. He is sure this conversation will go badly in some way, and this gives at least the impression of distance, though that wouldn’t help. His throat still hurts, raw from gasping for air where there was none. It’s funny, that that stuck with him and the seething heat didn’t. The Lichtenberg Figure runs in dark mud-filled lines over the side of Mike’s neck and up under his hair. Michael wonders if the dirt will come out.

“So you died?” Mike asks.

“If this is twenty questions,” Michael says, sharp, “It’s my turn now.”

“‘How did you get the scar’ is not a yes or no question,” Mike answers, just as pointed.

It would be so easy to dig in. Michael doesn’t know what happened to Mike, or how it affected him, _exactly_ but it wouldn’t be hard to guess. If he considered the Distortion and the Twisting Branches to both be limbs, that gave them different functions as part of the same being, and the same will. Michael had always thought of the two as hands and veins, if he had to be specific; intertwined, but separate and really not the same thing. None of it lined up perfectly, of course, because it couldn’t. If it could be reasoned with, or understood, it could be accepted processed. And that was just counterproductive. But it would be so easy to drag Mike back into questioning and uncertainty and fear. He had made the Lichtenberg Figure a symbol of another strength, but it was no less a fractal than before. Michael could probably wake that fear again. Stoke the paranoia again. He doesn’t push. “I didn’t ask.”

Another car pulls into the parking lot. It’s khaki green and ugly as sin. “No one seems to have anything better to ask. Always go straight for the personal—“ and here Michael snorts. Mike wants to complain about _personal questions_ when his idea of a conversation starter is ‘why are you fucked up’. “But sure. What were you going to ask?”

“Are we sticking with yes or no questions?” Mike’s question wasn’t one of those, so Michael figures he should find out what rules they’re playing by. It’s such a foreign concept he almost doesn’t register Mike’s answer when he realises what he’s actually asking for.

“Is that your question?” _God how fucking annoying_. Was Michael like this? It was less annoying when he did it. The door to the ugly car opens and closes, but Michael doesn’t notice anyone leave.

“So I think open ended questions should be fine. What’s going on with you and Jude?”

Mike looks stricken. “Wh—you mean like?”

“Are you friends?” Michael interrupts before Mike can stress himself into misinterpreting the question worse than he already has. “Or aren’t you? You both told me you weren’t. But she was lying and _you_ …were telling the truth. And she drove all that way to pick you up. So?”

Mike sighs. “I don’t think she can really have friends outside her little cult social circle,” he picks at the mud scabbed up his neck. “I don’t think I’d want to be her friend, beside. I think she’d be more likely to kill me if we were close than if we weren’t. With her whole devotion to the Desolation.”

Now there’s a term Michael Shelley had heard and never been able to grasp the context for. (Every time the link was almost made, another thread pulled his thoughts apart. He’d known that something was wrong. He had known that he should be able to know, to puzzle it out. It wasn’t until he’d smashed through the mirrors until the cracks began to repeat over every surface, until he’d reached the final door and been unsure what was the handle and what was the hand, until the ink from the map had bled onto his skin in branching veins, that he had been able to see the webs in his head for the fractals they were. It wasn’t until he was torn apart and woven raw into a new shape that he could know what he had been missing. And by then he would have known anyway, in the instinctual way one animal recognises another of its kind. And by then he couldn’t care.) “Desolation? Is that what she fears?” _Is that what consumes her?_

“That’s what she serves,” Mike corrects. It’s a funny sentiment.

“Is that how you both think this works? Or is that how it works for you?” Michael laughs. “I always thought people became what they were, to serve themselves, in some way. Or out of fear or force.” His had been force. Helen’s had been fear. Though it could have been the other way around, he supposes. He didn’t have to follow the map, or Gertrude’s instructions. But he had been afraid to find out what would happen if he didn’t. It likely wouldn’t have been much worse or different, he thinks. But it might not have stopped the ritual. ( _Not ‘not saved that world’, as now he knows._ ) Helen, though. Helen had been afraid to die, as most are, so he had forced her to make a choice. Die or change. Follow the path he set for her, or find out what would happen if she didn’t. It was their choice to smash the mirrors, and to open the doors. It wasn’t for some higher power or some perceived ‘god’.

Michael wonders what it would be like to feel that way. Being what he was, he can’t imagine worshipping it. Maybe it would have been different if he saw what he was from third-person, rather than first person-second person-third person all at once. Maybe he’d see more beauty or power or whatever it was these people saw if he’d stood further away from it all as they had. Easier to see how pretty a fire is from anywhere other than the fire pit.

“I know that’s how she thinks of it. The way she talks about it is…intense.”

“I can imagine that.”

“I can understand to an extent. I don’t know her exact circumstances but I think the Desolation saved her.” An interesting understanding. A bit self-centred, probably. Did devastation save Jude? It didn’t save anyone she met, or anyone she knew. It couldn’t even save Mike. She couldn’t lift him to the car or support him inside. She’d incinerate him. But again, Michael’s understanding was that Becoming had hurt him, and Being had hurt everyone around him. Maybe it was different for others, or maybe they just didn’t care. He hadn’t, while he had been, but that was a symptom of a larger problem.

“And you?” He asks, instead of voiding any of this. “Were you saved too?”

“I saved myself,” Mike turns his head up to face him. “But yes, I was saved too. What about you?”

_Here it is_ , Michael thinks. _Here is the gap between us_. Would he have been the same as them, if he had known even a bit of what they had, going in? Would he have been happy, or _saved_? “I didn’t need to be saved. I was killed,” he says, and he isn’t sure how much of it—or which part—is a lie.

“ _Shit_ ,” Mike answers.

“I think I wore it well,” he says. “Or it wore me well.”

Mike slides his hands down his face and laces them around the back of his neck. “Of course,” he says, to himself. “Why not.”

“You know, I thought that would be harder to say.” Not a good sign, that he’s so detached, but easier to live with for the moment than breaking down would be. “Must have been all the practice spilling my guts,” both however many weeks ago, and in his career at the Magnus Institute. There was no end to the supernatural admin workers who felt entitled to know everything about him. _That’s what you get_ , he supposes, _working for Sight_. Which reminds him; “Hey, have you ever given the Archivist a statement?”

Mike sighs so heavily that he starts to cough again. “Right,” cough “before,” gag “I died,” he eventually manages. He could have just waited until he was done dripping lines of mud drool all the way from his mouth to the ground.

“Me too,” Michael absentmindedly taps his fingers along the seam of the car door. He waits for a pause in the gagging, unsure Mike will hear him otherwise. “Shall we go, before Jude burns a hole in her seat?” Mike uses his short break to glare, and has to hold his breath to keep from coughing. “Are you going to cut off my air again if I help you to the door, or do you want to crawl there?”

“Fuck off,” Mike says, still catching his breath.

The car locks automatically.

“Or you could stay here,” Michael offers.

They stumble into the cafe. Mike’s arm is wrapped around Michael’s waist. Michael has his arm thrown over Mike’s shoulders. They make it without falling or running into anything, even.

Mike is wearing the snow jacket that hasn’t been real in ten years, zipped up and far too warm for the weather. They both decided it was better than just leaving him in his blood and dirt stained shirt and hoping for no questions. (Not that Michael and Jude are that much less dirt-stained, but they did have the helpful advantage of not being fully covered in it for months.)

Mike collapses as soon as they get through the door, every muscle gone stiff. His eyes twitch and dart about, still open and not seeming to follow any pattern or thought process. Not conscious, not really. _Unlucky_ , Michael thinks. _He’s probably spent a lot of time like that, recently_. Behind the counter, the barista writes a name onto a plastic cup.

The popcorn ceiling curdles and bubbles. Three teenage girls sit in a window booth, each speaking through another’s mouth. The walls are off-white wood panels, covered in posters for local events, and slightly shinier patches of space, where stains have been recently painted over.

Behind the counter, a person writes a name onto a plastic cup.

Michael drags the body to the counter, and leaves him on the floor in front.

Michael slides into a booth, keeping Mike still in his line of sight. He’s not _that_ uncaring. Not anymore. He’s just also not very nice. Not anymore.

Behind the counter, something writes a name onto a plastic cup.

Michael sits. There is no one sitting opposite him. There is no one sitting next to him. There is nothing sitting opposite him.

HELEN: Hello Michael. I was hoping we could have a little chat.

MICHAEL: Yes, I thought that must be the case.

HELEN: _Ye-e-es_?

[ _Her voice crackles with the trappings of a failing phone connection_.]

MICHAEL: It’s different with you here.

THE DISTORTION: What a wonderful way of saying you’ve missed me.

MICHAEL: That’s hardly it. I’m wondering what you’ve changed. Aside from—

[ _He gestures to the rest of the room._ ]

MICHAEL: —the obvious.

MICHAEL: I know that it’s something, but I don’t know what.

THE DISTORTION: You _know_ do you? That’s a step up from the you you were before me.

HELEN: He didn’t know _anything_ , did he?

MICHAEL: Is this a social call? Or did you have an actual—no, actually, I don’t think I need to ask if you had a purpose for being here. We both know even Ms Richardson was losing her purpose, by the end.

MICHAEL: Let alone you.

HELEN: It’s…charming, that that’s how you want to pretend that this works. You should know about purpose, shouldn’t you? Even Michael had one, in the end.

[ _Michael laughs, quietly and disbelieving. Helen’s long fingers tap the marble-patterned plastic table top. They almost look anatomically feasible as they do. Almost._ ]

MICHAEL: Hm.

THE DISTORTION: No, I just wanted to be…supportive. Bringing your meals home to meet your folks? You’re a natural at this, Michael.

HELEN: You never needed the hallways.

[ _Michael laughs again, louder. It isn’t a matter of needing the hallways, and both of them know it. It’s that Michael was made into and made out of them. His body ripped from him twice. It’s almost impressive, on how many levels Helen can lie. Not a home, not a meal, not his folks. Michael had never counted when he had done it. Can’t be sure now if he was the same._

_And at the same time, he had been the hallways and he had lived within himself for a decade and now Helen is the hallways. So maybe by that metric Helen is the closest he has to a home. It’s not a nice thought._

_And at the same time, what had he been doing with Mike and Jude, even if not consciously? Lying that he was human, that he was helpful, that he was alive every time he was killed. Suffocation, immolation, impaction; he could lie his way out of anything, he had found. Even if whatever he told them wasn’t not true, on some level he had always meant to deceive._

_And at the same time, if he still had living relatives he wouldn’t face them now. Not the same age, after going missing for a decade. Not taller and blonder and worse. Not that being worse was a bad thing, in situations like his. So with any living relatives—and the Institute—automatically out of the way, that really only left him with Helen, as his ‘folks’._ ]

Again _, he thinks_ , impressive _._ Just how does she manage _?_

[ _It’s rhetorical, of course. Michael was the one to turn the Distortion into a false friend. Into a liar rather than just a lie. So he’s not sure why Helen thinks that she can lie to him and have him believe it._ ]

MICHAEL: Is that how you want to approach this?

THE DISTORTION: Now Michael, you know that I’m hardly a ‘you’.

MICHAEL: I know _exactly_ how uncomfortable it is to be a you. I know that _you’d_ much rather be a what again. But it doesn’t look like that’s _in_ your immediate future, does it?

MICHAEL: Helen wears humanity much better than we did, I’d say. That’s what made her the perfect face. You should know that. I know that, and you were actually there for it. You’ll never find the perfect fit.

HELEN: You were a better glove than me. But you were _worn_.

[ _The voice she uses for this squelches. Michael isn’t sure if it’s intentional and he should feel insulted, or if it’s just a natural part of conversation for her. He doesn’t remember ever squelching when Helen was him. He doesn’t remember much._ ]

MICHAEL: Oh. That’s a good analogy.

[ _A pause. Helen’s fingers continue to tap. Michael notices that she has no fingernails, though the appropriate sound for them plays, lagged slightly behind the movement of her hands. Michael wonders if he also had no fingernails, in his turn._ ]

MICHAEL: Are you worried, Helen? I did wonder why I stuck around instead of dying. Certainly wasn’t this ‘durable' the first time around.

MICHAEL: Are you worried I’m at the edge of something? Is this you putting up guardrails to keep me from tipping over?

[ _Helen pats his arm. It goes numb, just a bit, under the weight. Her knuckles curl against the front of his jacket and under his chin._ ]

HELEN: You’d think you would want to take credit for your own work.

MICHAEL: No, I don’t think that’s it. You really shouldn’t worry so much, 'Ms Richardson’. I stepped down because I couldn’t do what you can, as I was. Your job is secure. Although…I could probably do it as I am now. Wouldn’t that be funny?

HELEN: Hilarious. Though I don’t see why you think the Archivist is so important as to spend so much focus on him.

MICHAEL: Huh. Guess it was always more my plan than our plan, then. Maybe I’m better at seeing how this is all going to tie together.

MICHAEL: It is nice to think that there’s something relevant that I’m able to do. Even if it’s likely just because it lets interests align. Isn’t it so sad to think that the things you do aren’t of your own merit, just someone else allowing you that because something needs to happen, and you’re one way to get things to that point? It’s unfortunate that some people live that way. An extension of a greater will, or just a method through which the plans will move.

MICHAEL: Could you imagine living like that? I think back then it made me scared, which was probably one of the desired effects. Now it just makes me sad.

HELEN: You certainly are on a tangent.

MICHAEL: I think I am. Does this mean anything to you?

HELEN: No.

MICHAEL: Then I guess I can let you go. Say goodbye and all that. Mourn you, even.

THE DISTORTION: Have you been holding on to me all this time?

[ _It tilts its head. It’s a good representation of curiosity, and it’s almost nice to know that the Distortion wants him upset. In some way, it still thinks he matters, and it thinks its faux-concern and curiosity will bring him to heel one way or another. Anger or want for validation; it doesn’t matter, as long as it works._ ]

MICHAEL: It’s not been that long. You were the best and worst part of my life. Say, do you think you’ll end up like me?

HELEN: Like _you_? Now why would I do that?

MICHAEL: So you think you’ll die properly, at the end.

THE DISTORTION: Well I never said that either.

MICHAEL: Okay. I don’t care anymore.

THE DISTORTION: Now you’re sounding like yourself.

MICHAEL: Now I’m sounding like you.

HELEN: …

MICHAEL: Where’s Jude, Helen? Short, wax, full of hot air?

HELEN: Oh I put her away.

MICHAEL: She’s going to give you indigestion.

HELEN: Well I didn’t put her away in the _hallways_ , that would just be silly!

MICHAEL: I’m not sure why you think I have to believe you when you lie to me. Maybe if you were more put together, or if it was something less capable of hurting you it would be fine. You have no flesh to hurt and your face and will are already stolen, but you can still be set on fire.

HELEN: My face and will are stolen, are they? I’m sorry you feel that way.

MICHAEL: You don’t have to acknowledge the way you exist but I know. In any case, I told Jude I’d meet her in the café half an hour ago, can you let me do that.

[ _It’s not a question, and there’d be no point to making it one._ ]

HELEN: She is that way.

[ _The Distortion points one of many distended fingers to a metal door with a rounded top and a finger print scanner next to it. It wouldn’t look out of place on some American FBI show, or maybe something set on a spaceship. It does look out of place against the ‘café’s’ wooden walls._ ]

THE DISTORTION: The rest of the café is that way also.

MICHAEL: Well, this has been fun. I was waiting for you to call me out. I even showed your fake-concern, for you. You didn’t believe me did you? Still, I appreciate the—

[ _Michael gestures vaguely at everything._ ]

MICHAEL: —effort. Did you mean to make the cars melt outside, or were you hoping I’d assume it was my eyes again?

HELEN: I was wondering if you would mention it. You played along very nicely.

[ _Michael hadn’t known if it would be the right move to mention it. He is, after all, still seeing things._ ]

MICHAEL: Shelley always was a people-pleaser. How long have you kept me, Helen?

THE DISTORTION: Just long enough. It’ll be like no time has passed at all.

Michael almost forgets to get Mike before he leaves. It was a near thing, but he had kept the sprawled body in his line of sight, which reminded him before he got too far. Michael hoists him up by the armpits. He isn’t very tall or heavy, but Michael isn’t very strong or coordinated. It balances out.

There’s a large patch of dirt caught in the carpet where Mike had been laying. It hadn’t been carpet when Michael had put him there, but he’s not convinced that it’s any more comfortable than the tiles it had first purported to be. Though really, no matter what surface Mike slept on, it couldn’t be good for him to spend time in the hallways so shortly after his time in the dirt. True to form, blood leaks down his neck from his ears when Michael gets him upright. Burst eardrum maybe? Michael’s not sure, but he thinks Mike should be able to withstand some pressure all things considered.

The door slides up into the ceiling. The café is not behind it, but Michael supposes the Distortion never said that it was. Just that it was ‘that way’. Jude is also not there, though that is probably for the best. He supposes it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Helen would make them wander for a bit.

Michael walks them straight, not bothering with any of the doors. No directions matter. They’ll leave if or when Helen lets them. He still has to drag his feet so that he doesn’t trip.

His skin stretches and flexes while he walks, as would any human’s. He would swear he could feel it chafing against his flesh, if there was anything to swear it to.

This ‘visit’ is not like the last time Michael Shelley was here. Sure, ‘Michael’s’ been ‘in’ these hallways plenty. But that was different. Now he isn’t part of the hallways, nor does he have directions. He has no reason to not be lost. He doubts the Distortion is making the path clear for them; it’s in the name that clarity is just not in its nature.

There is a mirror. Michael glances in it. The thing in his reflection is so small and shiny and rubbery. If he grabbed at it he would feel muscle and cartilage. If it struggled against him he would feel how its skin slides over its bones. They pass the mirror.

Michael blinks and what was a dead-end to the hall has turned into a door. He doubles them back to the mirror. Michael stares into it. Nothing stares back. His reflection and the thing in it has gone, leaving just Mike’s limp body, draped over nothing, in a hall different to the one they stand in. Mike’s getting heavy, but Michael doesn’t want to resort to dragging him by the ankles yet. Michael stares closer.

It’s not the right mirror. He doesn’t know why he chooses that, but he does.

Michael takes them through the door, and through the next right turn. He skips the doors in that hallway. There is a mirror on the left wall. He lays Mike on the floor so he doesn’t drop the both of them while he smashes the mirror with the worn heel of his snow boot. It fractures easier than he thought it would, cracking into a predictable fractal.

It’s nice to himself looking more like himself again, though he knows that’s not right. He should try to get over that probably. His hairline and upper lip are cold and slick with sweat. His eyebrows are wet too, and he wipes his face on the back of his forearm. He’s glad now that Jude taken his jacket without asking, for Mike in the backseat. It was cold in the car, but he’d hate to be stuck wearing it now, sweating his ass off in the Distortion’s hallways with some heavy stranger wrapped around him, when Michael hasn’t used or owned any muscles in ten years.

He wonders what Mike would think, seeing the Lichtenberg drawn all over their reflections. Probably nothing positive. He’s starting to wake up, so Michael hurries. The mirror breaks on the next kick and there is only one door in the next hall; a clear, glass automatic sliding door, though he can’t see anything on the other side of the glass, but the wall. The door opens when they near.

On the other side, Jude flags them over to a booth in the corner. She’s leaning on both elbows, holding a steaming cup of black coffee between both hands, up near her face. She isn’t drinking it.

Michael dumps Mike into the seats opposite her. He’s awake enough not to fall, though not yet fully lucid. Michael slides in after him, and pushes him over to lean on the window when his head starts to droop.

Jude looks like she’s trying not to laugh at him when she taps her chest and says “Got sidetracked, did we?”

Michael looks down. There is a £10 note tucked into his previously chest-pocket-less shirt. He sighs. Now people will think that he’s the type of person to wear t-shirts with chest pockets. It’s the only shirt he owns, too.

“We ran into a— my coworker,” he finishes. Would be a mistake to call Helen a friend. _They hardly know each other!_ he thinks, with a little private hysteria. _She’s the reason he has skin!_

“How cute. Now you’re as rich as Mike.” As if he could hear his name, Mike groans against the window. Michael realises that he has possibly forced him to lean on his head-wound. Oops.

Ignoring that. It’ll go away. “She _has_ saved me from asking _you_ for money.”

Jude grins. “She a coworker from the same job you’re owed ten years of backpay for?” Michael’s surprised she remembers, though he probably shouldn’t be. It was a weird thing for him to mention.

“No,” he smiles. “But she did leave a statement there about me once.”

Jude slams her coffee onto the table, not flinching when the scalding liquid sloshes over and drips down her hand. Part of her fingers drip down with it. “There is no way I spent a car ride with an employee of the _Magnus Institute_.” She spits the last words. Michael’s more interested in the fact that she has saliva to spit than her words, so he takes a minute.

He looks from the spittle on the table to Jude, who looks ready to kill him again. Not that she was ever _not ready_ to kill him. “To be fair,” Michael says, slowly, “I was ‘fired’ pretty spectacularly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> on tumblr at falseknight


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